Posts from Matt Blumberg

Email Intelligence

I am in my second decade as a board member on several companies. It doesn't happen often in the VC business, at least my VC business, because I get off the boards of companies that go public or are headed there shortly. The percentage of portfolio companies that don't shut down, sell, or go public within a decade of their initial VC investment is low. But the ones that make it into their second decade without an exit are special in many ways. They have staying power, an ability to evolve and grow, and a culture that is built to last.

The company in that group that this community is most familiar with is Return Path. Executives from Return Path, including its founder and CEO Matt Blumberg, have written guest posts here a few times. Return Path has reinvented itself three or four times in its history. And yesterday they did it again. They are now the global leader in email intelligence. They actually have been that for quite a while. But they gave themselves that label yesterday.

What is email intelligence? Well in Matt's words, it is:

[Emailers] are struggling with two core problems that complicate their decision making: They have access to so much data, they can’t possibly analyze it fast enough or thoroughly enough to benefit from it; and too often they don’t have access to the data they really need.

Meanwhile they face new challenges in addition to the ones email marketers have been battling for years. It’s still hard to get to the inbox, and even to monitor how much mail isn’t getting there. It’s still hard to protect brands and their customers from phishing and spoofing, and even to see when mail streams are under attack. And it’s still hard to see engagement measurements, even as they become more important to marketing performance.

Our solution to these problems is email intelligence. Email intelligence is the combination of data from across the email ecosystem, analytics that make it accessible and manageable, and insight that makes it actionable. 

In connection with the new reformation of their company's mission and position in the market, Return Path launched or relaunched three products yesterday. The one that is truly groundbreaking in my opinion is called Inbox Insight. Think of its as ComScore for Email. If you want to know how your mail is doing compared to your competitors across a number of key metrics like engagement, inbox placement, spam complaint rates, etc, you can learn all of that and more with Inbox Insight.

Starting, building, and running companies is hard work. I know this because I see it in the eyes and wrinkles of the people I work with every day. But building a lasting, evolving, growing, and market leading company is a terrific feat. I want to congratulate Matt and the team at Return Path, most of whom have been there as long as I have, on a big day yesterday and a great new tagline, mission, and market position. Well done.

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Presentations vs Discussions

We've been doing our Union Square Sessions events for almost as long as our firm has been around. We pick a topic, like Hacking Eduction, that interests us and we invite about forty people to sit around a big open table and talk about the issue for four to five hours. There are no presentations. We have amazing discussions at these events.

A presentation is like a TV show. It's a lean back experience. A discussion is like an online chat room. It is a lean forward experience. They are not the same thing and in many cases they work against each other.

This is particularly instructive when it comes to board meetings as I learned last week. We did our annual Return Path Board annual planning session last week. It is a grueling day. Roughly eight hours of review and planning discussions, both operational and strategic. In prior years, we'd work through a deck of well over 100 slides during the day.

Not last week. As Matt Blumberg, Return Path's CEO, explains in this post, we went without slides for the whole day. The Company did prepare a lengthy package that everyone reviewed prior to the meeting. But once we were in the room, the projector was off and the conversation was on. Matt managed the clock and made sure we got through the agenda. Everything else was impromptu.

It was a huge success as Matt explains:

We thought that the best way to foster two-way dialog in the meeting
was to change the paradigm away from a presentation — the whole
concept of "management presenting to the Board" was what we were trying
to change, not just what was on the wall.  The result was fantastic. 
We had a very long meeting, but one where everyone — management and
Board alike — was highly engaged.  No blackberries or iPhones.  Not
too many yawns or walkabouts.  It was literally the best Board meeting
we've had in almost 10 years of existence, out of probably 75 or 80
total.

"Changing the paradigm away from a presentation" is the point of this post. Presentations are important. I do a lot of them and post all of them on this blog in advance. I am not saying they don't have a role. But if you want to foster real engagement and real discussion, they are not helpful and in fact I think they are hurtful.

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